Recently, along with the spread of computers, materials for use at an office are often created by an application program such as wordprocessor software or spreadsheet software installed in a computer. It also becomes popular to print, by a printer, application data created by an application program, copy the printed material by a necessary number of copies, and distribute them at a meeting or the like.
The distributed material is bounded by a binder or the like and saved, or managed by an electronic filing device.
In some cases, application data is managed by a common file server or database software so as to share information.
A distributed printed material is often prepared by copying an originally printed material. The distributed material is further copied and redistributed.
Repetitive copying degrades the image quality accordingly, resulting in a poor image. When a color original is distributed, it is often copied in monochrome because a color copying apparatus is expensive and does not so prevail, greatly degrading the image.
To quote part of an original distributed by paper and newly reuse it as computer data, the original image is read by a scanner and processed as an image. The read image undergoes OCR to extract character data.
Processing of data as an image greatly increases the data amount, and makes it difficult to correct part of the data.
Extraction of character data by OCR also suffers problems such that an error occurs and character data cannot be correctly recognized, even if character data is correctly recognized, the font style and size cannot be reproduced, or the layout is lost.
Data can be easily reused if application data managed by a file server or database is acquired. If, however, data is not stored in the file server or database by the user himself, the location and name of the data and its search parameter cannot be obtained, and the data is hardly acquired.